


Can't Win After All

by Subtle_Salieri



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gambling, Gen, Personal Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-08
Updated: 2012-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-07 08:10:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/428823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Subtle_Salieri/pseuds/Subtle_Salieri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short drabble about that ten-dollar bet between Steve and Fury.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can't Win After All

Ten dollars was an awful large sum of money back when Steve lived in Brooklyn, 70 years back. It was one of the first confusing things after he woke up, the inflation factor. In this year ten dollars wasn’t a lot, but it seemed to be enough for an easy bet. 

Besides, what could shock him now? His body had been dramatically changed, he’d punched out Hitler, saw a man peel the skin off his face and then saved the world from nuclear holocaust. All this before waking up ‘in the future’ where he burst into the middle of Times Square — the buildings had stretched higher, touching the heavens, the old Sky Bar sign, which had been unlit during the war, replaced by things that crawled and danced with technology so shockingly mundane to the modern residents of New York. Nothing like that had ever happened to a single other living person. Perhaps he was jaded by that, but there was so little he could imagine that he hadn’t been through.

He didn’t live in 2011. He was just here. His mind was still reliving the last few seconds of 1945 he remembered. There was a crash course in what he missed for him, Civil Rights, the Cold War, Vietnam, the personal computer, 9-11, crisis, wars, conflicts. But it all had happened to his country, not him. He wasn’t there in any of it, the history drifting to the back of his thoughts. His mind lived on that plane that was eternally crashing.

After the history lesson came the present-lesson, and not just to teach him of the oddities like the Internet. He read what General Fury gave him, about this false god Loki, and the the blue box that everyone but he seemed to want to scrutinize; He just wanted to throw it back in the sea. What good could it do?

Steve was even more sure of the bet after reading through the material. If Bucky had still been around, he could testify that Steve didn’t know how to bet, but this was too well-stacked in his favor, and Steve understood that, at the very least.

This left him completely unprepared for the aircraft carrier — ‘Helicarrier’ — taking off into the sky, a small city airborne. The first time since that day in 1945, with the panic, with Peggy’s voice in his ear, that he’d flown. The turbines of air lifting them practically blew those thoughts away, made him uncertain, and the wide and empty sky made Steve wonder how much bigger everything was than his experience, no matter how unique it was. 

A lot bigger.

And he was still a lousy gambler.

“You won, sir.”


End file.
